Age of Voodoo Read online

  “Mr Dove,” Gable said. All of a sudden his wizened, weatherbeaten face, normally genial, had turned deadly serious. His eyes no longer twinkled, but instead reflected the starlight in a pale, unnerving fashion. There was a sharpness in them that hadn’t been there previously, an intelligence. “You need to lissen up now an’ lissen good.”

  “Gable...”

  “No.” The grip on Lex’s elbow tightened. Both the dogs stood erect, ears up, and one of them bared its fangs and started growling. “Me said lissen. T’ings are rollin’, boss. Me ain’t jokin’. Bad t’ings for you. Sumtin’s started that has to be stopped, and you is the man to do it. But you ain’t goin’ to manage it alone. Help’ll be offered you, and when it come, you don’ turn it away, you knowum sayin’? Whatever your finer feelin’s, you don’ say no.”

  “I have no idea what you’re—”

  “Can’t you feel it?” Gable pressed his face closer to Lex’s. Lex smelled rum and ganja on the man’s breath, along with the musk of his body odour. The breeze from the sea intensified, pummelling the palm fronds overhead, and then dropped abruptly, leaving a profound hush. The second dog joined the first in growling, and their two deep rumbling vibratos rose and fell in eerie counterpoint. “Change on the wind. The end of a beginnin’ an’ the beginnin’ of an end. You’ll need to make the right choices, boss. What’s best for you, what’s best for others, though the two mayn’t necessarily be the same. You here for a reason, even if you don’ realise it. But you goin’ to learn, oh, yes. You goin’ to learn the hard way.”

  Then Gable let out an enormous gale of laughter, howling with hilarity at some magnificent jest which only he understood. He let go of Lex and waved him onward with the crutch.

  “You go now, Mr Dove,” he said, still chuckling. “Dismissed. On your way. An’ don’ say me didn’t warn you. No, sir, don’ never say that.”

  At the same time, both of the dogs relaxed, prone on the ground, as though obeying some silent command.

  Lex peered at Gable for several heartbeats, nonplussed. He debated whether to remonstrate with him, force him to explain further what he’d been talking about. But what would be the point? A tramp, befuddled with booze and cannabis, could hardly be expected to make sense. The man had had a sudden brain-fart that had caused him to grab hold of a passerby and spout a stream of non-sequitur banalities. Maybe he was schizophrenic. Not beyond the realms of possibility, given his lifestyle.

  Whatever the reason, it wasn’t worth getting worked up about. The sooner Lex ignored it, the sooner he could forget about it.

  BUT HE HADN’T quite succeeded in doing that by the time he reached home. Gable’s odd outburst continued to prey on his mind. The right choices? Learn the hard way? It had the ring of prophecy about it. What did it all mean?

  Nothing, he told himself. Nothing whatsoever.

  Lex’s house was built along Spanish colonial lines, adobe-plastered, capped with rounded roof tiles, and laid out in the indoor-outdoor style. It had a central courtyard, wide open to the elements on one side, the other three sides surrounded by rooms without a dividing wall, just a waist-high partition. These constituted the main living area—kitchen, lounge, study. There were other, fully enclosed rooms in a wing that ran off perpendicular to the courtyard, plus a garage and storage space. The garden was lush with hibiscus and bougainvillaea, and the coarse lawn was studded with acacia trees and a tall tamarind whose fruit was an irresistible lure to the vervet monkeys. High in the hills here, where the trade winds blew harder, it was always a couple of degrees cooler than at sea level. The daytime views over rolling jungled slopes to the ocean were spectacular.

  Lex poured himself a couple of fingers of neat rum and went out onto the verandah to sit and listen to the nocturnal chorus of chirruping insects and whistling tree frogs. It had been an unsettling evening. First Seraphina, the proverbial blast from the past. Then Gable with his peculiar rant. All Lex wanted was a quiet life. He thought he had found it, and he was determined to hang on to it as hard as he could.

  A rustle in the shrubbery, and out onto the verandah popped Rikki. First a sharp, conical snout poking between two posts of the balustrade, then a lithe, cylindrical body with a striped back. The mongoose scuttered a few steps across the floorboards, then paused and peeked up at Lex with his tiny, fierce black eyes.

  Lex tipped his tumbler at the creature in greeting. “Wondered if you might be putting in an appearance tonight.”

  The mongoose moved a fraction closer, cautious, not timid. Finally he halted beside Lex’s chair and settled down to grooming his whiskers and fur.

  He wasn’t a pet, but over the past year Rikki—named after the Kipling story—had become a kind of companion for Lex, a silent little familiar. In the late 1800s mongooses had been introduced to Manzanilla by the Spanish in order to tackle the island’s chronic snake problem. The place had been infested with cascabel, fer-de-lance and bushmaster, so much so that death by snakebite accounted for at least twenty per cent of fatalities among the population. A hundred mongoose breeding pairs had been released in the interior, and by the turn of the twentieth century snakes were all but a thing of the past. Enough survived to give the mongooses something to hunt and eat, but they were no longer the omnipresent danger they had been.

  Lex welcomed Rikki’s presence on his property. It meant he never had to worry about where he set foot. He could walk around house and garden with no shoes on and be perfectly safe.

  Also, he felt an affinity with the mongoose. A ruthless, efficient killer. Specialty: getting rid of creatures no one wanted, the ugly ones with venom and fangs and a bad temper. Lex could identify with that.

  He finished his rum and drowsed for a while. The tumbler slipped from his grasp and clunked to the floor, rousing him briefly and sending Rikki racing for the shadows of the garden. He thought about going to bed, but the drowsiness overtook him again and he fell asleep right there on the verandah.

  His dreams were never peaceful. They were always about restless things. Beings that should be dead but weren’t. The faces of victims. Mouths that yawned at him, sometimes soundlessly, sometimes uttering words in languages he only half understood. Accusing. Insisting. Demanding to be remembered, to be taken into account.

  A few he recognised. The rest looked like strangers, even though he ought to know them.

  A roll-call of evil. Dictators. Tyrants. Terrorists. Mass-murderers.

  The deservedly dead. The righteous dead. Code Crimsons.

  Yet they would not leave him alone.

  Lex awoke, startled.

  His phone was ringing.

  If it was that bloody Seraphina again, already...

  But the caller ID said Wilberforce.

  “Wilb?”

  “Lex. Thank God. You got to come. I’m in deep shit. For real.”

  “Wilb, where are you?” Lex’s watch said 1.10AM.

  “Outside home, in my car. I just pulled up. There’s these men waiting for me out front. I wouldn’t have stopped if I’d seen them in time. Now they’ve spotted me, and I’m screwed. Please. Help. Quick.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  “Great. Just hurry, because—”

  There was the sound of voices other than Wilberforce’s, shouting, angry. A car door opening. A scuffle.

  Then the line went dead.

  Lex was on his feet, sprinting for the garage.

  FOUR

  THE GARFISH

  WILBERFORCE LIVED ON the outskirts of Port Sebastian, Manzanilla’s capital, in an area that was only one step up from a shanty town. His house was a wooden cabin painted bright green, yellow and red, with a tin roof that groaned under the weight of a satellite dish and a solar-heated water tank.

  As Lex pulled up in his Subaru 4x4, he saw Wilberforce’s battered Mazda saloon parked outside. The driver’s door stood wide open. There was a car blocking Wilberforce’s driveway, a hulking Jeep Grand Cherokee tricked out with bull bars, running boards, chrome trim, rally headlamps
and blacked-out windows. Few Manzanillans could afford a pimp ride like that, fewer still who weren’t involved in some kind of shady dealings.

  What the hell was Wilberforce mixed up in? How had he got on the wrong side of a gang of criminals?

  Contain the questions for now. Focus on the matter at hand.

  There was nobody about on the street, but lights shone in Wilberforce’s house. Lex left the Subaru, vaulted a low chainlink fence and padded across the front lawn. He listened out. From indoors came the sound of a raised voice. Lex couldn’t make out the words. Then the unmistakable smack of fist striking flesh, and a cry of pain—Wilberforce.

  Lex stiffened. His pulse rate increased. He felt a surge of adrenaline. His senses sharpened and his awareness of his environment intensified. An old familiar calmness suffused him.

  It was strangely glorious to have it again.

  He began a stealthy circuit of the house. The bad guys, whoever they were, were confident. Overconfident. They hadn’t posted anyone on guard duty outside. They must not have seen Wilberforce making a phone call from his car. They had no idea he had summoned reinforcements. They thought they had him entirely at their mercy and no one would interrupt them while they worked on him.

  Lex arrived at the back door. Wilberforce never locked it, but the hinges needed oiling and the door always squealed like a banshee when opened.

  But the window next to it, giving onto the bathroom, slid up as silently as you please.

  Lex slithered through, easing himself via the toilet onto the tiled floor. He had a gun, a SIG Sauer P228, tucked into the waistband of his trousers, hidden under his shirttails. It was loaded with Speer Gold Dot 9mm parabellum rounds, the kind of bullet that put two holes in the human body, a neat entry wound and a massive crater of an exit wound. He had no intention of using the SIG except as a last resort. Luckily, Wilberforce shaved with a cutthroat razor. Lex plucked the razor from the basin and levered it open, exposing the blade which Wilberforce stropped religiously and kept wickedly sharp. Then he stole over to the bathroom door, nudged it ajar, and peeked into the living room.

  Wilberforce was fastened to a chair by plastic zip restraints. Three men surrounded him, and one was clutching Wilberforce’s head by the jaw, tilting it up so that they could see eye to eye.

  “The boss has been waitin’,” he said to Wilberforce. “Waitin’ real patiently. He’s a kind man, a generous man, but even he can’t wait forever. He makes a loan, he expects it to be paid off as and when the instalments come due. How come you ain’t done that?”

  “I—I missed one repayment, that’s all,” Wilberforce stammered. “I didn’t mean to. I got my books messed up. It was insurance premium renewal time on the rum shack. I had enough for that, but not for anything extra.”

  “So the lousy fuckin’ insurance company comes first, not the boss?”

  “I thought he wouldn’t mind. I will pay up, honest. Double the usual at the end of this month.”

  “Yeah, you will,” said the thug. He wore a blue and gold football shirt, Manzanilla United’s home strip. The Other Man U, as it was known. “Of course you will. But you’re wrong about the boss not mindin’. He minds plenty. It’s the principle of the thing, see. One person lets an obligation slide, then everyone else thinks they can. Which is why you need to be taught a lesson. Not for your sake, for everyone else’s.”

  Lex glimpsed brass knuckledusters. Wilberforce’s head snapped to the side. Spatters of blood flew.

  Football Shirt drew back his fist for yet another punch.

  Lex was on him faster than a cheetah. He whirled Football Shirt round, yanking his arm up between his shoulderblades. The cutthroat razor hovered at his Adam’s apple.

  “Pay attention,” Lex told Football Shirt’s two comrades. “I will slice from carotid to carotid if you do not do precisely as I say. You have to the count of five to leave.

  “One.

  “Two.”

  Neither of the other men budged. Football Shirt whimpered deep in his throat.

  “Three. I’m not kidding. In a couple of seconds’ time this man could be aspirating his own blood.

  “Four.”

  Football Shirt nodded urgently to the other two.

  The two edged towards the front door. Lex followed, pushing Football Shirt before him.

  “That’s it,” he said. “Out you go. Nice and easy.”

  Outside, Football Shirt murmured, “You’re makin’ a serious mistake, man.”

  “Says the dickhead with a razor blade at his throat.”

  “You fuckin’ with the wrong guy.”

  “I think you’ll find it’s you who’ve fucked with the wrong guy.”

  They approached the Jeep.

  “Get in and go,” Lex ordered. “You come back here, any time, and I’ll know. And then I will seriously mess your shit up. Understand?”

  The front passenger door of the Jeep swung open and out stepped a giant in a seersucker suit. He was holding a pistol, a long-barrelled Desert Eagle .44 Magnum which, though a sizeable weapon, was dwarfed by his massive hand. A pair of Calvin Klein sunglasses perched atop his smooth-shaven head.

  “Tell me again,” the giant said in a bassy booming voice. He levelled the Desert Eagle at Lex, and diamond cufflinks sparkled at his wrists. “Who goin’ to mess whose shit up?”

  LEX KNEW EXACTLY who this was. He had never seen him in person before, but everyone in Manzanilla had heard of Garfield ‘the Garfish’ Finisterre. Seven foot tall, skinny as a whip, he was the island’s premier drug lord and loan shark. Garfish were pencil-thin, electric-blue fish that darted through the beach shallows and among the reefs, but there was nothing pretty or innocuous about this character. He had everyone who mattered in his pocket, from government bureaucrats to police officers. He was a master of top-down corruption and, it could be argued, Manzanilla’s true head of state.

  Wilberforce had really screwed up if he was in hock to the Garfish. But then, that put him on an equal footing with fully a fifth of the island’s population. Maybe as much as a third, if some reports were to be believed. When you wanted to borrow a lump sum of money, but didn’t have the kind of equity or capital a bank demanded, Finisterre was the man you went to.

  “Saw you creepin’ round the back,” Finisterre said to Lex. “Reckoned you’d try and save my friend Wilberforce in there, but I didn’t think you were anything my boys couldn’t cope with. Runty white punk like you. Seems like I guessed wrong.”

  “Seems like I should have checked that car first before I went in.” Lex was making light of it, but he could have kicked himself. Rookie blunder. He’d been on civvy street too long. Rusty.

  “Told you you were makin’ a mistake,” gloated Football Shirt.

  “Shut up, you.” Lex pressed the razor hard enough against the man’s neck to break the skin. Blood trickled from an inch-long incision. Football Shirt let out an anguished hiss.

  “Yes, shut up, Maurice,” said Finisterre to his henchman. “You haven’t exactly covered yourself in glory tonight, lettin’ yourself get sneaked up on and caught. Amateurish, that’s what it is. Not what I expect from an employee of the Garfish.

  “So,” he said, returning his attention to Lex, “we appear to find ourselves at an impasse.”

  “We do.”

  “You got my guy at your mercy, I got you covered with this.” He jerked his head at the Desert Eagle. “How we goin’ to resolve this?”

  “Simple. You back off, or Maurice here gets it in the neck. The three of you climb into the Jeep and drive away. Then I let Maurice go free and he can make his own way home. How about that?”

  Finisterre rebalanced his sunglasses on the dome of his head, pretending to consider Lex’s proposal. “Maybe.”

  “You don’t have a clear shot,” said Lex, careful to keep Maurice angled between him and Finisterre. “Miss me, even wing me, I’ll still be able to give him a new breathing hole. And don’t doubt that I’ll do it.”

  “Oh, no.”
Finisterre looked deep into Lex’s eyes. “I can see that. You got it in you, all right. You have the look. I know who you are now. The Englishman who lives on the hill. What’s your name? Goose? Pigeon? Somethin’ birdy like that. You sort out troublemakers at Wilberforce’s shack, but always real polite, askin’ them to leave if you can rather than makin’ them. Placid on the outside. Don’t look like you’d harm a fly. But below, deep down—somethin’ dark in there, I can tell. Somethin’ dangerous. People’ve wondered what you used to be before you came here. Now I think I know. Yeah, you’d kill Maurice in a heartbeat, no question. Only trouble is...”

  “What?”

  “I don’t care. Don’t care at all if he gets hurt. The stupid incompetent asshole.”

  Finisterre angled the Desert Eagle downward.

  Maurice managed to yelp, “Boss! No!” before Finisterre shot him in the kneecap.

  Maurice shrieked and sagged in Lex’s arms, suddenly dead weight. Lex, thrown off-balance, stumbled. He went crashing to the ground with Maurice on top.

  That saved him, because when Finisterre fired again, Maurice took the bullet, right in the chest. In the same instant, Lex dropped the razor and reached behind him for the SIG.

  His return shots had, perforce, to be quick and desperate. There was no time for luxuries like sighting, lining up, aiming for centre of body mass, any of that. He snapped off three quick rounds, scattering Finisterre and his men, none of whom had had any idea that Lex was packing a gun. He clipped one of the henchmen on the arm and managed to take out one of the Jeep’s side windows.

  Finisterre and his two men took refuge behind the car while Lex pedalled himself backwards with his heels, keeping Maurice on top of him. He was making for the house, using the now very dead bruiser as a shield.

  Finisterre’s Desert Eagle barked twice across the Jeep’s bonnet. Lex answered with the SIG, firing low under the car. The ricochets made the crooks dance and skip in panic. With a huge effort he hauled himself and the corpse across the threshold, then rolled Maurice aside and took up a kneeling position behind the front door. He squeezed off two more shots, destroying one of the Jeep’s wing mirrors and putting a hole in the rear nearside door.